


Verticillaster (the fire ecology remix)

by maypop



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 11:09:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15948137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maypop/pseuds/maypop
Summary: Links in a chain, to the past, to the future.





	Verticillaster (the fire ecology remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiraMira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiraMira/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Annuals](https://archiveofourown.org/works/192691) by [MiraMira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiraMira/pseuds/MiraMira). 



> (Please do read the original first, I'm not sure how much sense it makes on its own!)

The Phoenixblossom is dying.

The roots--which want to be deep and thick and full of everything it takes to survive the burn--struggle to push through this dense, wet, black soil. Designed to hoard sips of water, they soak in the English rain until they go to bloat and rot. The little leaves and fast, snaking tendrils that want to cover the ground, they're soft and they want soft ash to protect them until they harden. 

The Phoenixblossom is holding on, in this microclimate where an explosion blasted gravel into the ground ten-odd years ago, before the party moved inside. There's a sudden drop in the ground, to the North, a gash in the earth only lately fuzzed over with clover and spreading rosettes of dandelion leaves, and the scar drains the water away. The fallen honey mesquite left a spot where the sunlight, weak as it is here, can bear down on the Phoenixblossom's unnaturally straining stems. The maid comes out here, where no one ever goes, to smoke, and drops her cigarettes in the little grey-green mat.

It's not enough. The foaming beancaper is dead. The goblinberry manzanita didn't last even through the fall, after their caretaker stopped coming. Prickly wandbush, which shyly turns its leaves away from direct light and bakes in reflections and refractions from a sun much more blunt than the face she shows to Kent, the wandbush grew thin and spindly and desperate and then slumped over and died, an exhausted heap of twigs that you couldn't have slipped a pixie's heartstring in.

It's not enough, these little embers, this yellowed sun, this choking mud. The flowers it puts out have gotten smaller and colder every year. Last year they were a half dozen cups of tea; this year, a mild fever in three pale umbels. Three little domes of warm yellow, like a shower cap for a mouse, and next year, there will be none. For now, the Phoenixblossom curves around a handful of tiny coals it feeds dribbles of sparking sap, and survives.

"Dare I ask what you're doing in the dirt?"

"Stealing," a second voice says, quite cheerfully.

"Alice Edwina Dorothy Wood, this is not the time for your jokes."

"It's Phoenixblossom, father. It's not native to England, I wonder how it got here--"

The first voice is notably cool. "This was your aunt's conservatory."

"Was--? Oh. Yes. I. Yes."

"Quite. Come inside."

"She'd want me to have them, then, I expect."

"That's ghoulish."

"What's ghoulish is treating her like a, a Grindlewald war memorial, not a real witch who planted real flowers. What's the stasis spell for living things--right, it's _Ra_ \--"

The Phoenixblossom is waiting. Oh, gone is the killing mud! Gone is the murderous shade and the water, the horrible water, the cold, disease-carrying water. Sweet soft ash cradles new growth, and full size coals smolder, half-buried in the rocky soil.

(How the trimmed roots smarted, in the baking sand, how the healing burned. How those unnaturally tall stems sway in the wind and tell anyone who knows to look that this Phoenixblossom had to strain for the sun. How small those tendrils had to cinch themselves to nurture a cigarette butt, and how those tight curves have hardened.)

The Phoenixblossom, triumphant, furls out young blossoms, and gouts out the heavy, ozone smell that attracts the sparkbats and the Hippolyte moth and the Pepper Hare, with its lovely bristly fur. And it waits, to spread the bounty of the first-after-fire herb, the smokecrawler, the comes-before-grass.

"Dare I ask what you're doing in the dirt?"

"You have Phoenixblossom!"

"I have a permit, I swear, and the plot's warded against spreading--"

"It's _beautiful_."

"...You really think so?"

"Oh, yes."

"The last wizard I brought home said they stank."

A brush across one of the feverish little flowers. Pollen, jostled loose by an elbow, sifts down over neighboring blossoms.

"I guess they do, a bit, but... Alice."

"Oh, no. What's that voice?"

"This is kind of embarrassing, but, um. I actually knelt down for a different reason." A throat clears. "Will you--"

"Yes! Yes, a thousand _times_ , yes, get up here, oh, Frank--"

The Phoenixblossom is young. Everything here is dead. This is the youth of Phoenixblossom, after the fire cracks the iron-hard seeds open and leaves an open space. The first tiny leaf hides in ashes, hides from any nibbling mouth that might have lived, hides until the root is strong and thick enough to make new leaves for the ones it loses. It works fast, this young Phoenixblossom, for the fire burned hot and magical in this place. The first miniscule leaf it put above the ash reflects a light floating green and unhealthy in the sky.

Someone is turning over the ashes.

"Dare I ask what you're doing in the dirt?"

"There were--there were--my father planted them, they can't be, they're Phoenixblossom, they wouldn't, they wouldn't, they _have_ to have made it, I _can't_ \--"

A tiny bit of water on a young leaf. Salty. Useless.

"Neville. If it's plants, then no one knows more than you. Could a Phoenixblossom have survived cursefire?"

The ash-turning slows. The voice that speaks again is slower, and clearer. "Yes. Anything except Fiendfyre, and even Fiendfyre if it's, um, if the seeds are buried deep enough. I'm sorry, I know this isn't--it isn't important--"

A second pair of hands joins the first, in the ruin of Longbottom House.

" _Lumos._ Tell me what I'm looking for. Neville? Come on. Will there be flowers?"

"Not... not this early in the year. Hannah--"

"If you say it's here, then it's here. We'll find it."

The Phoenixblossom is in fruit. The Phoenixblossom is a continent away from anyone who knows the secret of eating Phoenixberry (sun-drying, then rehydrating and cursing at for a full minute; or you can make a jam) so other than giving a few Jarveys a bellyache, the berries mostly just return to the soil. A few manage to roll away from the raised bed their parent lives in, off to hope for fires of their own.

"Dare I ask what you're doing in the dirt?"

"What are these little black things?"

"Phoenixberries. Don't eat them."

"Dad."

"As your father, I am legally obligated to tell you not to put things you don't recognize in your mouth. Or ear. Or nose--"

A shriek. "That was _once_! I was _three_!"

"You know, your Great Grandma told me my father gardened to relax, but what's relaxing about pulling a hexdrupe out of a screaming toddler's nose I'll never--"

"I haven't eaten anything weird in years."

"I know, love. I'm only teasing. Your mother sent me out here to tell you the guests are here. Come in when you're ready, alright?"

"Yes, dad."

"Love you."

"Love you too."

Neville leaves his daughter standing by the raised bed of sand, gently rolling the tiny black fruit between her fingers, fascinated by the taut skin and dark gleam. It'll go into the pocket of her dress robes, and be forgotten, and make its way to Hogwarts, and lie dormant until it finds, who knows? A greenhouse, a fireplace, a flowerpot, a battlefield. Life goes on.


End file.
